Natal, and across the Atlantic to somnolent Fisherman’s Lake in Liberia. The remainder of the trip was by two-engine C-47 transport planes to Kano and then Maidugiri, both in Nigeria, across the scrubby wilderness of Chad to Khartoum dominated by the Nile, up to Cairo, swarming with handsome British staff officers whom the troops called the gabardine swine, over to Tel Aviv, down to the Shatt-al-Arab, carrying the mingled waters of the Tigris and the Euphrates, out above the azure-emerald Persian Gulf to Sharjah’s desert airstrip manned by an RAF ground crew of a forlorn half dozen and a gazelle, along the desolate, jagged coasts of Iran and Baluchistan to Karachi, and finally trans-subcontinentally to teeming, beholy-cowed Calcutta.
The flight from New York to Calcutta, stopping at night and encountering delays, took thirteen days. Because of bottlenecks in air transport to Burma, I remained in the effete luxury of Calcutta’s Indo-Anglo-American society for some ten days waiting for my turn to join Stilwell. During this time I encountered C. J. Pao, the shrewd and engaging Chinese Consul General whom I had met in Peking and who, in my adversity twenty years later at the foot of the Andes, proved to be a staunch friend.
Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek had given Stilwell, now a Lieutenant General, the benefit of a great deal of faint-hearted advice and orally told the American he was to command two Chinese armies (each of three understrength divisions) on their way to the front in Burma. The Japanese were north of Rangoon, which they had occupied on March 6. The mixed force of British, Burmese, Indian, and Gurkha units under General Sir Harold Alexander had been badly shaken by the swift ferocity of the Japanese onslaught. On what may be euphemistically called a line, east-west in lower Burma, the British Empire units occupied the western sector and the Chinese, with a toe-in-the-water disposition, moved tentatively into the eastern. Allied air support was from the British Royal Air Force (RAF), whose obsolescent aircraft were being rapidly destroyed, and from Chennault’s American Volunteer Group. The AVG, with new P-40 pursuit planes and aggressive tactics, outperformed the enemy, but nevertheless were being ground down by sheer superiority of Japanese numbers and AVG lack of aircraft, parts and personnel replacements.
Soon after assuming command of the Chinese expeditionary force in Burma, Stilwell discovered that his assumption was indeed no more than that. His orders were secretly referred back to the Generalissimo for final decision. Chiang also issued behind Stilwell’s back a babble of vacillating orders to his distracted officers in the field, even down to the regimental level.
The Generalissimo was morbidly defensive-minded, and in its most fatal manifestation: static defense, yielding the initiative to the enemy. Furthermore, in his obsessive hoarding of materiel and troops he only reluctantly committed his units to battle, and then piecemeal. For he believed that to concentrate force was to risk greater loss than committing it in minimal increments. Which was, up to a point, true. But it was not the way either battles or wars are won.
Stilwell’s headquarters were at Maymyo, the prettily landscaped summer capital to which the Government of Burma had retreated. Stilwell was not at his headquarters but at the front when I arrived on March 22. And Pinky was with him.
The next day the General and Dorn returned to headquarters, a big red brick rest house belonging to the American Baptists. Stilwell was tired, but still exuded his characteristic nervous energy. On March 24, the following day, I noted in my diary,
General Stilwell in his bare room off the bare upstairs porch said, “Sit down.” Each in a wicker chair, he said “There’s nothing I can tell you about how to run your job. You’re a free agent. All you have to do is keep things running smoothly between the civil authorities here and us.” So much for functioning, as the Department of State had enjoined me, “at the direction and under the supervision of General Stilwell.”
Civil authority in Burma was collapsing on all sides. The Burmese, including officials and lesser government employees, felt no loyalty to their British masters. And with the Japanese trampling all under foot, most Burmese, including those who were servants to the King-Emperor, were in panic looking to their own safety and for ways in which they might ingratiate themselves with the new conquerors. The more enterprising took to sabotage, ambush, arson, and otherwise acting as collaborators of the invaders. There was precious little civil authority left for me to deal with. Any authority that existed was military—and that only when immediately enforceable by a bullet in the head.
In establishing relations with the Government of Burma, I called first on the Governor’s military aide, who seemed to be not at all put out that at 4:40 p.m. I had roused him from a siesta. At tea and cakes with him and his pet gibbon, Miss Gibb, I took up with him my first piece of business— the misuse of jeeps by Chinese soldiers for private enterprise. Ah yes, the police in Mandalay had complained to the offending Chinese military on this score, only to have abuse heaped upon them. So the problem was a military one, not a civilian one.
The Governor, Sir Reginald Hugh Dorman-Smith, hospitably received me a few days later with pink gins and wide-ranging discourse. We concluded that Americans and Britons should be on guard against rumors designed to create rifts between us. The Governor made mild fun of the confused command structure in Burma, a matter on which his principal secretary, a Mr. Binns, had the day before spoken out more plainly to me. Binns had observed that General Stilwell had introduced himself as commander of the Chinese Fifth and Sixth Armies, the Chinese expeditionary force in Burma. Then General Tu, the commander of the Fifth Army, represented himself in much the same way. General Alexander, the senior British commander in Burma, of course regarded himself as in command of all the allied forces in this British colony. And finally, Binns pointed out, by the constitution of Burma only the Governor is in charge of the defense of Burma, no one else. What Binns did not know was that the Generalissimo was also in the act, regularly undercutting the authority he had conferred upon Stilwell.
By the end of March Stilwell was so wroth over the Generalissimo’s bad faith and deceptions that he flew to Chungking to seek a showdown with Chiang. He took me with him, for there was nothing constructive that I could do with the Government of Burma in a condition of rigor mortis. In any event, it was time that I reported to the Ambassador from whose embassy in Chungking I was detailed to Stilwell. En route to Chungking, Stilwell picked up Chennault at Kunming, to which place Chennault had withdrawn his badly battered AVG leaving the enemy in uncontested control of the Burmese skies.
When Stilwell was having it out with the Generalissimo, I was paying my respects to the Ambassador, my tepid admirer from days at the Department and Peking, Clarence E. Gauss. Although I respected his utter rectitude, his Puritan sense of duty, and his inquiring, precise mind, I sensed that the depressing, ingrown atmosphere of Chungking, rancid with spite and intrigue, had soured Gauss. I thought that he needed a change. The Ambassador, for his part, did not think much of my detail to the General. With a wry smile he said that I belonged behind a desk, at work in his embassy, not gallivanting around China-Burma-India.
To Chennault I passed on Currie’s advice about playing ball with General Arnold. Chennault said that his volunteers, among whom discontent and indiscipline had become rife, would willingly accept induction into the Army Air Corps provided they were first returned home to see their families, as promised in their contracts. Although he did not explicitly say so, it was evident from his presentation that he agreed with his fliers that it would be unfair to induct them—and himself—forthwith. Chennault, after all, had no desire to be subordinate to Stilwell, an old foot soldier. The airman enjoyed having, as a favorite of the Chiangs, direct access to the Generalissimo and Madame Chiang. They found most congenial his doctrine that Japan could be defeated by air power with minimal ground effort. And there was little doubt in Chennault’s mind that he was the one uniquely qualified to accomplish this feat. As he said to me, the Army Air Corps would need one thousand men to do what he could do with one hundred and fifty.
Gauss, Stilwell, and Chennault were the three dominant American personalities in China from early 1942 until late in 1944. They were, all three, strong-willed, each highly competent in his own profession, dedicated to and tireless
